The city of 200,000 people was teeming with life. Roads were thick with lorries and cars. A densely-packed sprawl of houses covered the shoreline, with buildings built out above the sea. A mass of jetties to moor boats – looking from the sky like thin tentacles – stretched out into the bay. Well-worn patches of grass had evidently been used as sports fields.

Then on Friday the most violent storm to ever make landfall hit – lashing the city with winds of 195mph, and driving the waves onto the land.

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And after a six-hour battering, Tacloban is unrecognisable.

Where once was a bustling ship yard, now is a mass of mud and debris, with four vast container ships hurled onto the land. The warehouses have been flattened, and the moorings washed away.

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The tightly-grouped houses have been reduced to rubble, with no sign of those that once sat above the waves. The sea seems to have reclaimed the land, wiping away any man-made structures near the shore. The hillsides covered in thick woodland have been reduced to a treeless mound. And huge patches of wooden, plastic and metal debris float on the waves like a brightly coloured oil slick.

"In the first few days, following the initial devastation, DigitalGlobe's satellites collected and delivered over 19,000 square kilometres of imagery in the hardest hit areas, including Tacloban City and the surrounding areas," said the company in a statement. Their online subscription service, FirstLook, was activated for emergency managers and their business customers.

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"FirstLook's frequent revisit times have enabled rapid delivery of quality imagery content during this time-critical event," the company said.

Other imagery has been able to show how the electricity was cut to the affected areas. The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere – a department based at Colorado State University – released images showing before and after the storm hit.

Before, the black images are covered in small white dots showing the lights on at night – with a large area of white showing the big towns of Cebu, Ormoc and Tacloban.

But two days later the light has been significantly reduced in Cebu, while Ormoc and Tacloban are almost totally in darkness.